LETTER FROM THE EDITOR - VOL. 24
KCCNYC Monthly - May 2026
By Eun Byoul Oh
In Korea, children gift their parents with carnations for Parents’ Day.
Happy AAPI month everyone!
And Happy Mother’s Day for every mother in our community!
During the month of May, KCCNYC will be celebrating AAPI Month through various events and are proud to celebrate Asian American Pacific Islander Month with the NYC community. We especially celebrate Korean heritage with our affiliate organizations and friends.
We opened our AAPI heritage month with The New York Yankee’s Korean Hat Day, which was really fun! The weather was perfect, our Korean edition of Yankee’s hat was really cute, and our community had a really fun time. Thank you everyone for joining us!
Yesterday, our community was able to join a book launch for the Korean-American children’s book Yuna Choe and the Perfect Bowl of Rice. We are honored to collaborate with the event to celebrate Korean American identity and children. I think the book had a very important message for Korean children!
We look forward to seeing everyone at our Kimchi-Sauerkraut event, which is a cohosted event with the 14th St. Y. Please see the event details here. You can register through the form here to get the promotion code.
Park Sang Young, the author of Love in the Big City will come to our June Pride book club to discuss his book Love in the Big City.
Along with the AAPI events in the newsletter, this volume of KCCNYC Monthly highlights Korea’s Family Month (가정의 달) In May every year, Korea celebrates Parents’ Day (어버이날), Children’s Day (어린이날), and Teacher Appreciation Day, so the month of May is often nicknamed as Family Month. Every year in May, I also remind myself that there are many forms of families – that families should not be solely defined by blood relationship, but people who you love and who can support each other. I want to uplift our community and volunteers for being a great family to each other in time of need.
In our monthly book club, Dosan Hakdang, we are reading The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Hwang Sun Mi, to celebrate Children’s Day. RSVP link is here. We also announced our June Pride Month book, Love in the Big City, where the author will be with us to discuss the book. I hope you can join us for a meaningful and special discussion on the books. RSVP here.
Aside from the theme of Family Month, KCCNYC commemorates the 5.18 Gwangju Uprising every year with our community. We remember the lives sacrificed for the democracy of Korea. Korea witnessed the horrors of violence perpetuated by the government, and the will of the people to resist against the violence. The spirit of the Gwangju Uprising is still relevant in our time, as we become the living witness of the violence and war around the world.
Youth of May is a great drama to watch during May.
We ruminate and celebrate the courage of people of Gwangju in May of 1980, that enabled them to speak up against the dictatorship. I would recommend everyone read this newsletter (simply type “Gwangju” into our archive search), read Han Kang’s Human Acts, watch the movie A Taxi Driver, or watch the series Youth of May, if you have not already. We have included a very special history article on the Gwangju Uprising in this newsletter, so please don’t forget to read it.
I believe that the people of Korea were able to remove Yoon Seok Yeol from his Presidency because we had never forgotten the footsteps of Gwangju and other student activist movements in the 1970s and 1980s. The KCCNYC Monthly team will continue to publish articles on the history of Korea with the hopes that the history of Korea will be remembered by many of our students and community members.
Lastly, I also want to say a special welcome to our new students who joined the new spring term of Korean classes. We are excited to have everyone back in our classes, and we thank you for your support for our program.
Thank you very much. 모두 감사합니다,
Eun Byoul Oh
